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France kills a Canadian takeover from Couche-Tard, digging a moat around a national corporate champion

France kills a Canadian takeover from Couche-Tard, digging a moat around a national corporate champion

France kills a Canadian takeover from Couche-Tard, digging a moat around a national corporate champion
Jan 18, 2021 1 min, 18 secs

Couche-Tard usually faces little opposition when it expands overseas, but it finally met its match on the weekend, when it and Carrefour, the French retailer that introduced the big-box “hypermarket” format to Europe in the early 1960s, abandoned their merger talks.

Couche-Tard had offered US$20-billion for Carrefour, one of the biggest food retailers in Europe and France’s top private-sector employer, with 105,000 workers.

But the French cabinet didn’t want to reveal the probable real reason it wanted Carrefour kept in French hands: It likes big head offices – and there is nothing wrong with that.

And it’s unlikely Couche-Tard would have cut Carrefour jobs or shrunk the head office.

It would have made no sense.

The Canadian company’s purchase of Alstom would have been unthinkable.

French-style interventionism may be abhorrent to free-market capitalists, but it has preserved a lot of French head offices, and many European countries have more or less adopted France’s model.

The French government’s refusal to support Couche-Tard’s bid for Carrefour was wrong on many levels and sent out the message that France is not always open for business.

France has a fleet of high-profile head offices and the high-quality jobs that go with them.

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